Beauty Is a Wound (46 page)

“And that’s why she became a prostitute,” wrote Rosinah. “I feel like I’m writing my mistress’s biography.” And she chuckled.

“How could our daughter have such a vile way of thinking?” Aneu asked her husband.

“Don’t think badly of the child,” said Henri. “We’re no better, a brother and sister who decided to marry—you mustn’t forget that.”

No one had forgotten it, not even Rosinah, who had only heard their story from Dewi Ayu.

Then the ghost came again, this time overturning the table and their cold glasses of lemonade with it.

But no one suffered more terribly from ghosts than Shodancho. For years after the massacre he experienced terrible insomnia, and then when he did finally fall asleep, he suffered from sleepwalking. Communist ghosts were out to get him all the time, even sabotaging him at the trump table and making him lose again and again. Their constant annoyances were driving him insane—he’d often put his clothes on backward, or walk out of the house in his underwear, or go home to the wrong house. Or he’d think that he was making love to his wife but it turned out that he was fucking the toilet hole. The water in his bathtub would turn into a sticky pool of blood, and upon investigation he’d discover that all of the water in the house, even the water in the teapot and the thermos, had also suddenly thickened into dark red blood.

Everyone in the city sensed those ghosts and were terrified by them, but the most terrorized of all was Shodancho.

Ghosts sometimes appeared at his bedroom window, blood pouring endlessly out of holes in their foreheads, moaning as if they were trying to say something but had lost all powers of speech. If Shodancho saw them, he would scream and cower with a pale face, and Alamanda would come and try to calm him down.

“Think about it, it’s just the ghost of some communist,” Alamanda would say, but Shodancho could not be comforted, so she’d have to chase those ghosts away. Sometimes the ghosts didn’t want to leave, and if they kept on moaning as if they were asking for something, Alamanda would give them things to eat or drink, and they would drink as though they had crossed a vast desert, and eat as if they’d been fasting for three years, and then they would disappear and Shodancho could be placated.

At first he really wasn’t very scared as all that. If a communist ghost appeared with his gunshot wounds, mouthing some verses from the
Internationale
, he would just take out his pistol and shoot it. At first the ghosts would disappear with one shot, but after a while they became immune. Shodancho had shot so many ghosts in so many corners of the city that they turned bulletproof. They wouldn’t vanish, but the shots would leave behind more bullet holes in their bodies, squirting out blood. They would still just stand there, and then they would try to come closer, finally making Shodancho run away, and that was when he began to feel truly afraid.

With all he was suffering, Shodancho seemed crazy, but he wasn’t hallucinating. Other people could see what he saw, and other people feared what he feared. The difference was that he was more violently afraid than anyone else, especially compared to his wife, who after a while had grown accustomed to the ghosts and thought that at some point they’d probably get tired of bothering them.

Shodancho had to admit that he had killed a lot of communists, so he couldn’t be surprised if they were plotting their revenge. He had to be careful around them but even when the ghosts didn’t appear he was still constantly hounded by fear, which was turning his life into a chaotic mess.

Worst of all, his daughter, now ten years old, also seemed troubled. Ai, or Nurul Aini, was always complaining that an ambarella seed was stuck in her throat. She would chase after her father, asking him to help take it out. Shodancho told her the ghosts were responsible, and Ai believed him. Only her mother understood that the girl was just seeking attention from her father, who had grown so distant, caught up in his own fear.

Also, Shodancho’s fear drove him to all kinds of irrational behavior. He once saw a crazy homeless guy striking a dog. Everyone knew that Shodancho really liked dogs, that he raised dogs, and that during his guerrilla years he had bred
ajak
. When he saw that crazy homeless guy hitting the dog he went on a rampage, beating him senseless and then throwing him into prison. Of course a crazy homeless person being thrown into military prison without a proper trial, just because he’d hit a dog, confused everyone. Even Alamanda was taken aback, and asked her husband:

“What really happened?”

“That homeless guy was possessed by a communist ghost.”

Then a drunk fisherman was singing loudly in the middle of the night, waking everyone, including Shodancho, who’d finally just been able to fall asleep, for a moment overcoming his feverish insomnia. He immediately went out carrying his pistol and shot that drunk in the leg and then dragged him to the jailhouse.

“Are you crazy,” asked Alamanda, “throwing someone in prison just because he got drunk?”

“He was possessed by a communist ghost.”

Again and again, he accused everyone who did something that didn’t please him of being possessed, and the last remnants of the old calm Shodancho, who loved to meditate, were completely gone.

Finally, in the year 1976, Alamanda brought him to Jakarta since there wasn’t yet a mental hospital in Halimunda, and returned after a week, fully entrusting Shodancho to the care of the nurses, because no matter what was going on she still had a daughter to take care of.

Shodancho was gone from Halimunda for a while. The ghosts didn’t disappear after Shodancho’s departure but they were no longer displaying their damaged bodies or unleashing their cries of pain. And Shodancho, who could accuse whoever he didn’t like of being possessed by communist ghosts with impunity and torture them or throw them in prison indefinitely, suddenly seemed more frightening to the city folk than the ghosts themselves, and so his absence brought everyone a sense of relief.

But Shodancho soon returned.

“Damn it!” was the first thing he said. “Those doctors thought I was crazy, so I shot one of them and I came home.”

“You certainly aren’t crazy,” said Alamanda, “you’re just a little bit not sane.”

“There’s an ambarella seed in my throat, Papa,” said Ai.

“Open your mouth and I’ll shoot that little communist.”

“Do that and I’ll kill you,” threatened Alamanda.

Shodancho never shot at the ambarella seed, even though Ai opened her mouth as wide as she could.

Coming home to Halimunda meant returning to the source of all his fear. He tried to raise more dogs to chase away any ghosts that might approach, and this seemed to be somewhat successful in cutting down on their attacks, but a number of ghosts outsmarted the dogs by flying up onto the roof and appearing through the ceiling. Shodancho would yell and scream in his bed and Alamanda would serve the ghosts food or drink, which was all they ever seemed to want.

“Only Comrade Kliwon would ever be able to get them in line,” Shodancho complained.

“Well, too bad then that you sent him to Buru Island not long after Krisan was born,” replied Alamanda tartly.

This was true, and Shodancho deeply regretted it. Not because his wife had been furious at him for breaking his promise, because, from his point of view, he hadn’t done so: his promise to Alamanda had only been to let Comrade Kliwon live, and the man’s life had in fact been spared, and besides Shodancho was powerless to influence the commanding generals who had decided that Comrade Kliwon was one of die-hard the communists and that they all had to be exiled to Buru. Shodancho only regretted that Comrade Kliwon wasn’t there to control the communist ghosts. He needed that man and thought that he would have to somehow get him home, or else be forced into exile himself.

He chose the latter.

Reports of a military occupation in East Timor had been coming in: guerrilla fighters were giving the National Armed Forces a bit of trouble, and Shodancho enlisted. He would say sayonara to the ghosts and go to East Timor, even if it meant leaving his wife and daughter. All of the generals knew his reputation and knew that his guerrilla knowledge was precisely what was needed in the occupied regions.

Shodancho’s plans to leave soon became the topic of public conversation. At a farewell celebration at Independence Field on the day of his departure, a military marching band played. Then Shodancho traversed the city in an open jeep, dressed in full military attire, waving at all of the city folk and smiling derisively at all the restless, tortured ghosts. He and his retinue passed the city limits and gradually disappeared.

He had forgotten to say goodbye to his wife and child.

“He didn’t even take out the ambarella seed,” Ai complained.

“Trust me, he won’t last long there,” Alamanda comforted her. “He was an amazing guerrilla in Halimunda, but East Timor is not Halimunda.”

And she was right. Within six months Shodancho was sent home with a bullet lodged in his shin. It seemed the city folk would never truly be rid of him.

He complained to his wife about how hard it was to make war in that shitty place, trying to make himself feel better about his swift return. “I don’t know what they are looking for in that barren battlefield.” She tried to get him to go to the hospital to remove the bullet, but Shodancho refused. He said that it didn’t hurt anymore, just made him limp a little. He wanted it stuck there as a bitter souvenir: “Because the man who shot me aimed his rifle while singing the
Internationale
. It turns out those communist scoundrels are everywhere.”

After a while, Comrade Kliwon’s library had to close. A vicious rumor spread that he was poisoning the minds of schoolchildren by having them read noneducational trash, connecting this to his past activities as a legendary communist. Comrade Kliwon was enraged by that hogwash, but Adinda was able to calm him down. He finally closed the library, storing away the books and vowing that when his child grew up he would instruct him or her to read all of them, and people could see whether or not that child’s morals were destroyed.

“It’s not that I don’t want to offer them trashy noneducational books, the problem is that they already burned all the trashy noneducational books I had,” he said.

Shodancho had just opened an ice factory, using some joint capital from a shadow partner. Knowing that Comrade Kliwon was having difficulty after being forced to close his library, he proposed that the man help run this factory, practically as a full partner. Of course this was a very promising business. There were the ordinary fishermen but please note, since the collapse of the Communist Party (which meant the disbandment of the Fishermen’s Union) there were also more big ships operating in the Halimunda seas, and they all needed ice. Comrade Kliwon was not at all interested in that proposal. He didn’t state his reasons—maybe they were ideological, or maybe he felt uncomfortable taking any more help from Shodancho and his wife after the morning of his scheduled execution—but chose to become a bird’s nest hunter instead. The nests could be sold at very high prices to Chinese merchants, who then would resell them in big cities and abroad. Comrade Kliwon didn’t care who was going to eat the bird’s nests, which according to him tasted no more delicious than plain macaroni—it was said the nests were made from the birds’ saliva, but Comrade Kliwon couldn’t have cared less if the nests were made from their shit—all he thought about was getting the things and selling them to the Chinese middlemen, and he joined a hunting team of four new friends.

There were walls of steep cliffs all along the jungle on the cape, and in those cliffs there were caves, big and small, high and low, the lowest ones visible only when the tide went out, and there in those caves the pretty black birds made their nests, coming in and out of the mouths of the caves, swooping across the foaming waves.

The team usually went out at night, armed with cages, a little bit of food, flashlights, and emergency antivenom medicine, because the birds shared their caves with serpents. The four men approached the cliffs silently, on a rowboat without a motor. They had to be very patient navigating the fickle waves that sometimes cooperated and sometimes closed off the mouths of the caves, and they had to constantly be on the lookout for the turning tide that could come rushing in without warning, trapping them inside a cavern. Sometimes they would drop an anchor at a jutting reef, take out their safety ropes and climb up the cliff, risking their lives to reach the higher caves. This work was incredibly exhausting, and sometimes they’d be kept waiting for days by unforgiving weather. But the hunts’ earnings made the four of them quite prosperous. The money was way better than what Comrade Kliwon could get in the fields and rice paddies or from the library.

And he led his life as a nest hunter for about a month, while Adinda waited for him anxiously back at home, with the little newborn Krisan, but then one night one of the men slipped and fell, sliding down a cliff and slamming into a coral reef. He died instantly, not needing any help or even a hospital. They had already gathered lots of swallow nests that night, which suddenly all seemed worthless because they were also bringing home their friend’s corpse. Everything they earned from selling those nests was given to the dead man’s family, and then Comrade Kliwon and his two other friends stopped their hunting. Of course there would be other hunters, and other dead men, because the birds would keep on making their nests, but Comrade Kliwon had decided to forget that frightening business—he realized that if he died, he would leave behind a wife and a newborn child. He didn’t want to do that.